Marvel’s latest series Wonder Man trades CGI spectacles for an intimate character study about ego, craft and the inconvenience of superpowers.
There is something deliciously ironic about the fact that Wonder Man began as a joke.
On the set of 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, director Destin Daniel Cretton casually suggested that Marvel could probably build an entire series around Trevor Slattery. Yes, that Trevor Slattery. The infamous thespian who, in 2013’s Iron Man 3, was revealed to be a washed-up British actor hired to impersonate the terrorist mastermind The Mandarin. A man so desperate for work that he agreed to cosplay as global evil. He was played, with an almost-Shakespearean commitment to absurdity, by Oscar winner Ben Kingsley. Someone even mocked up a fake poster. The punchline, of course, is that Marvel actually went and made the show.
At the same time, the studio had already been developing a project around Simon Williams, the comic book character known as Wonder Man. In the source material, Simon is a wealthy industrialist turned Avenger, who also happens to be a movie star. Under the guidance of Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, that mythology was inverted. What if (pun intended!), instead of being a superhero who dabbles in acting, Simon were an actor first, and the powers were the inconvenient subplot?
Enter Tony Award winner Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Simon Williams, a man who has spent a decade circling Hollywood without ever quite breaking through. He has done the auditions. He has waited for the callbacks. He has endured the rejections. It’s a familiar premise that we have visited many times before, in movies like La La Land, Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive. But this time around, it’s been Marvel-ised, of course; there is the small matter of the fact that he possesses actual superhuman abilities in an industry that has quietly decided superpowered actors are bad for business.
It is a welcome and refreshing change, as we the audience have been conditioned and primed to see superpowers as a boon more than a bane. But here, Wonder Man poses the central question: Can having powers be a problem? Rather than watching a protagonist punch through walls, here, we are watching him try not to.
Which brings us back to Trevor Slattery, now repositioned as a surprisingly poignant mirror and foil. Trevor, freshly sprung from his Mandarin infamy and still clinging to the romance of “the craft”, becomes Simon’s unlikely mentor and (minor spoiler alert!) an adversary, at least for a period of time. It is a pairing that feels absurd on paper and oddly perfect in execution. One man once pretended to be a terrorist mastermind for fame and money. The other is hiding real superhuman abilities in order to get cast as ordinary. Both are performers. Both are frauds in different ways. Both are aching to be taken seriously.
Under showrunner Andrew Guest, whose résumé includes Community and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the series sidesteps the usual origin-story bombast. This is a show that is closer to a Midnight Cowboy-style hustle through Hollywood. And this is precisely why Wonder Man may well be the Marvel show for people who scoff at Marvel shows.
If one is tired of extensive lore or suspicious of anything that requires a viewing order spreadsheet, this series meets them halfway. It is not interested in escalating stakes or teasing the next crossover event. It does not demand encyclopaedic knowledge of Phase This or Multiverse That. Wonder Man feels less like an entry in a franchise and more like a wry industry satire-commentary that just happens to exist within one. (That said, while it works beautifully as a self-contained story, it is not a bad idea to have Wonder Man step into the larger MCU one day, especially after such a strong and assured introduction.)
It also arrives at a fascinating moment for Marvel. Since the cultural crescendo of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the studio’s once-unassailable dominance has wobbled. There has been talk of superhero fatigue. In that climate, thankfully, Wonder Man feels less like filler and more like a deliberate experiment. Smaller in scale, sharper in tone, and willing to let conversations breathe. Its strength lies in its lead character, written (and acted) with much nuance.
What makes Simon’s character particularly compelling is that, although he is positioned as an outsider, he is in fact disarmingly relatable. He is not lazy. He is not delusional. If anything, he cares too much. He obsesses over motivation. He wants to honour the text. And yet that devotion to the craft is precisely what seems to hold him back. His intensity becomes a liability. It is difficult not to recognise that dynamic. How often are people penalised not for indifference, but for caring too deeply. At the same time, the show does not caricature studios as villains. The friction between artistic integrity and commercial pragmatism feels uncomfortably real, and the show allows both sides to exist without turning either into a straw man. That tension gives the series its quiet bite.
A series that began as an offhand joke on a film set has become one of Marvel’s most introspective offerings. There is something fitting about that. In a franchise built on spectacle, this is a timely and much-appreciated story that finds its real sense of wonder not in power, but in vulnerability, ego, and the courage to be seen without fancy suits.
All episodes of Wonder Man are now screening on Disney+.
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